


Ten Talks

by Kalya_Lee



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Character Study, Doctor-Companion relationships, F/M, Gen, New Who 10th Anniversary
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-16
Updated: 2015-03-26
Packaged: 2018-03-18 04:33:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 13,982
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3556175
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kalya_Lee/pseuds/Kalya_Lee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“There’s a lot of things you need to get across this universe. Warp drive… wormhole refractors… You know the thing you need most of all? You need a hand to hold.”</p><p>In honour of New Who's 10th anniversary: a study of the Doctor and his friends, across time and space.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Big Bad

Rose only ever finds the Doctor when she’s not really looking.

It’s not just that the TARDIS has so many rooms, or that Rose hasn’t really any idea why the Doctor would be hanging around in any given one of them – she’d found him in an empty room that’d been completely encrusted with diamonds, once, and it’d taken her breath away but also mostly left her wondering as to what he could possibly have been doing in there – or that he’s been using his Amazing Telepathic Abilities of Doom to purposely avoid her.

(She does think it may be that last one, some nights, but it’s not something she really likes thinking about.)

If asked to give her best guess, Rose would say that it’s probably because he’s the Doctor, and so he’s infinitely smarter and dafter and more alien than anything she could possibly imagine, and trying to predict his movements would be like trying to catch a hurricane in a pop bottle – pointless, a bit stupid, and ultimately very messy.

When she’s not really looking, though, that’s different. Like tonight, for instance, when she’d reckoned he’d be in the console room tinkering like he liked to do after a particularly taxing near-death experience and instead found him in the middle of kitchen number two, making tea.

 “Where’s Adam?” he asks, not even turning from the counter. Rose flops down at the kitchen table, a gorgeous round thing made of some glossy blue-grey wood, and rolls her eyes.

“Hiya, Rose,” she says, mimicking the Doctor’s rough burr. It’s a terrible facsimile, she knows, but she doesn't really care. “Real nice to see you, been missing you, let me make you a cup of tea and maybe a nice plate of crumpets to go alongside.”

The Doctor snorts. “Yeah, nice try, princess,” he says, taking his mug and settling into a chair across from her. Rose is winning, though of course he’ll never admit it, she can see it in the smile in those bright blue eyes, making them wink and sparkle like sunlight on ice.

They’re tired tonight, though, and the sparkle just catches on something a bit darker. Rose scoots her chair closer to his.

“Your boy’s in bed, then?” asks the Doctor, bright eyes fixed on hers. “You should be too, you know. Been a long day.”

“Yeah,” says Rose, and doesn’t point out that Adam isn’t _her boy_. Talking to the Doctor’s like talking to her mother sometimes, honestly. “But I’m a big girl, Doctor. ‘S not like I have a bedtime.”

“Well, you should,” the Doctor says, with a stern look. Rose bites back a laugh. “It’s the middle of the night. You’ll want to get some rest before you go falling headfirst into someone’s sacred ceremonial pool. Again.”

“There’s no such thing as the middle of the night in the Vortex,” she says, drawing air quotes, “and anyway, weren’t _you_ the one who nearly fell over and pushed me right _into_ that pool because you’d forgotten you were allergic to coconut water? I don’t see _your_ mighty Time Lord head on a pillow.”

Sometimes, Rose thinks, she really hates talking to the Doctor. He’s the most fantastic man she’s ever met, and he’s always got something amazing or mind-bending or hilarious or important to say, true, but talking to him on bad days is like dancing the waltz over a minefield. Right now, she’s not thinking about the amazing things the Doctor might say. She just wishes she knew what it was that _she_ had said to make his face fall like that.

“My ship, my rules, Rose Tyler,” says the Doctor, eyes open but _closing_. “My insomnia has nothing to do with you.”

Rose shoots him a look. Sometimes, she decides, the best thing to do when someone is hurting is to give them something to fight.

“What’re you gonna do, carry me to bed?” she asks, raising a challenging eyebrow and pairing it with her best smug grin. “You’ve met my mother, Doctor. You don’t scare me.”

The Doctor drops her gaze, fingers tightening around his mug. _Aha_ , thinks Rose, and watches his knuckles turn white.

“I should,” he says, and his voice is light and joking and underneath it’s all inward-pointing knives. It makes Rose’s stomach hurt. “I’m a fairly terrifying figure, I’ll have you know. Picked up a couple pretty impressive titles, over the years. The Warrior, the Bringer of Darkness.” He looks up, then, fixes her with a look that chills her right through to the marrow, and the smile on his face is so sharp it hurts to look at. “The Oncoming Storm.”

Rose looks down; the Doctor’s hands are shaking. She slides one of her own over the one gripping the mug, casual as she can, and tries not to flinch when he pulls back instead of holding on tight.

“Yeah, well,” says Rose, and swallows hard to keep her voice from shaking, “’S a bit hard to take you seriously, now I’ve seen you up close. Ears like that, no one’ll really be focussing on your _reputation_.”

Silence. Rose crosses her fingers under the table, but does not look away.

The Doctor laughs, and it’s raw and ragged, but Rose takes it as a win anyway. She grins, catching her tongue between her teeth just because she knows it’ll make him smile back, and watches as his fingers unclench from around the mug and settle on top of hers, cool and dry, barely shivering.

“I’m sorry,” says Rose, abruptly, “about earlier. What I said – I was scared, yeah, but just ‘cause I’d never seen you that angry, and I was just – you could never,” and her voice is vehement, rising in pitch till it cracks and she really, really doesn't care, “you could never become anything I wouldn’t trust completely, Doctor.”

“I pointed a gun at you, Rose,” the Doctor says, soft and rough, “I nearly let you die twenty feet underground in a concrete tomb. Don’t go telling me what I could and couldn’t do.”

He pushes his chair back, scraping it loud and violent against the floor, and stands to go. Rose watches him for a long moment, this scarecrow of a man with his long limbs and harsh face and black-clad sorrow, and launches herself at him in a hug.

The Doctor’s not a small man, and Rose comes up about as high as his broad shoulders under normal circumstances, but she’s hopped up on adrenaline and high aching emotion and also twisting and leaping awkwardly out of a kitchen chair, and her arms tangle artlessly but sturdily around his shoulders and across the back of his neck, and she buries her head in his chest right between his hearts and stands up on her tiptoes and holds on.

After a moment, she feels a pair of wiry green-jumpered arms wrap tight around her waist and pull her closer, feels a sharp chin tuck itself down over her left shoulder, feels the double heartbeat pattering against her cheek stutter and then slow, and she pretends she doesn’t feel the dampness growing at the back of her shirt. She can hear the Doctor breathing, a sharp gasp and then slow and deep, and presses her face against his jumper and doesn’t open her eyes.

Slowly, gently, the Doctor untangles himself from her grasp, setting her down with her feet flat on the floor. “Go to sleep, Rose Tyler,” he says, and his voice is warm, and his eyes are still shadowed but not as much as they were, and his touch on her shoulder is tender and light.

Rose smiles. “Goodnight, Doctor,” she says, and goes.


	2. Ghosts

“You know, Doctor,” says Mickey, leaning hard against the console, “I’ve been thinking.”

The Doctor looks up at him, flashes a quick smile. Rose loves that smile, it makes her knees go all weak and wobbly and she gets soppy and starts skipping around like she’d stopped doing when she was seven, and this always makes Mickey want to stomp about like a stroppy little kid but he has to admit that between the manic glee in the man’s really very huge eyes and his ridiculously bright white teeth and that little-boy expression that Rose seems to find so attractive, he can kind of see why –

Never mind. It’s not like that sort of thing works on _him_.

“Good on you, Mickey-boy,” the Doctor says, still grinning that stupid grin, and no actually Mickey _can’t_ see why Rose would ever find that attractive because to him it just looks like a massive neon sign flashing the words _I’m a git_. “It’s a good exercise, you know. You should do it more often.”

“Yeah, right, thanks for that, mate,” Mickey snaps, rolling his eyes and wondering, idly, when Rose turned into a complete idiot.

There’s a small lull, the silence broken only by the sounds of the Doctor tinkering with the console and doing his damndest to ignore Mickey’s very presence, he shouldn’t wonder. Mickey’s never been good at small talk, never wanted to be, really, but all this awkward quiet in between the times when he and the Doctor actually have something worth saying to one another does get old really quick. It gets so bad sometimes that he’s even grateful when the Doctor and Rose go off on some impossible tangent for a bit, because they always leave him out of everything anyway and at least the nattering fills in the silences.

Mickey sighs. He’d best just get this over with, then.

“Doctor,” he says, as firmly as he can, “you really need to start being careful.”

The Doctor’s smile falters. Mickey sees. He’s not really an idiot, after all.

“Oh, Mickey,” says the Doctor, too easily, “I’m always careful,” and the lie is spelt out so clearly in the too-deep smile lines around his eyes.

“No,” says Mickey, “you’re not.”

Another silence, but not exactly for a lack of things to say. Mostly, Mickey’s waiting for a reply, but the Doctor seems to be really busy re-wiring the TARDIS telephone and avoiding Mickey’s eyes.

“She would have waited for you, you know,” Mickey says, and the Doctor stops tinkering.

“I know,” says the Doctor, low and quiet in his throat, “I know.”

“No, I don’t think you do,” says Mickey, and yeah, he does feel a little guilty for pushing so hard but it has to be done and he’ll do it. “We fall out of your life so easily, Doctor, and maybe Rose can’t see it, but I can. You leave us behind like your mate Sarah-Jane or you go off all half-cocked like some fairytale hero, crashing through bloody mirrors on a bloody horse, but you don’t _think_ , do you. You don’t realize that on some spaceship in the future you’re leaving behind a girl who’s just gonna wait and wait until you get back. And if you never come back she’s gonna get old and grey up on that spaceship and she’s gonna die there, and she isn’t even thinking about getting in your TARDIS and going home like you wanted her to because that would be leaving you behind and she’ll never do that, not ever, and you know what I don't think you _do_ know that because if you _did_ I am going to go right over there and _punch you_.”

Again, silence. It seems to be a running theme between the two of them, Mickey thinks, and sighs again.

He’d been glaring in the Doctor’s general direction throughout the duration of his little rant, but now he looks the man in the eye, and, well. He’d never actually figured the Doctor for a stone-hearted arsehole, even when said Doctor had been crop-haired and cold-eyed and even sharper-tongued and that assessment looked increasingly tempting every time he opened his stupid mouth, but he’d still never imagined the Doctor could ever look properly wrecked.

There is a small, tender part of Mickey that looks a bit like Rose and a bit like his Gran that is currently kicking him in the head. The rest of him, however, is mostly smiling in grim satisfaction, because at least, at last, the Doctor seems to be listening.

“I have no intention of hurting Rose, Mickey,” says the Doctor, coolly, evenly. “I give you my word.”

His eyes have gone hard, but behind the anger lurks a flickering shadow of what might be guilt, or maybe fear. Mickey can see it all too clearly. He’s hidden all sorts of things behind his rage, himself.

“I know,” says Mickey, almost sympathetically. “you never do. But you see, that’s part of the problem.”

The Doctor nods once, absently, and Mickey has no way of telling if the nonchalance is faked or the Doctor actually doesn’t give a toss. Giving credit where credit is due, he decides it’s probably not the latter.

“You’re her everything,” Mickey says, just to be sure, and it hurts to say it, but. “I just hope you realize that, Doctor. And I know you care about her, hell, you might even love her, but in the end she’s just a bright light that’s one day just gonna blink out and you’ll forget her even if it takes centuries ‘cos you’ve got those but she hasn’t, and if you’re not careful you’re gonna become all she ever – “

“Hey,” says Rose, from the doorway, her hair frizzy from sleep, her feet bare. “What’re you boys doin’ up at this hour?”

She grins, tongue-touched and radiant, and Mickey feels his heart stutter but of course she’s only got eyes for one of them and it isn’t him and one day he’s going to get used to the idea, he really is. “I thought you’d still be sleepin’ off that hangover, Doctor,” she says, eyes sparkling and too focussed, “seeing as you just invented the banana daiquiri last night, and all. Or do Time Lords have two livers, too?”

The Doctor grins back at her, that dazzling smile, and Mickey knows he’s the only one who sees the slight hollowness in his dancing eyes. Used to be, he thinks, Rose could spot something like that from across the street. Maybe, somewhere between blinding herself with stars and falling in love with a walking blob of angst in a tight suit, she just stopped wanting to see.

“Ah,” says the Doctor, bouncing on the balls of his feet, “Mickey was just helping me with some repairs. You know, man stuff. You wouldn’t understand.”

His smile is cheeky and bright and stays cheeky and bright as Rose slaps him on the arm. The Doctor never could keep looking dark when Rose was around, far as Mickey can see anyway. Maybe that’s part of the problem, too.

“Well, come on, then,” says Rose with a yawn, “where to?”

And the Doctor dances round the console in that mad way of his, babbling about spa planets and continent-wide flower gardens and planets where the trees grew little fruits that looked like rubies and sapphires, and then he looks Mickey dead in the eye, just for a second, and says, “thanks for the help, Mickey-boy.”

“Yeah, sure,” says Mickey, “anytime,” and he really, truly hopes that the Doctor’d meant it as much as he does.


	3. Doctors

The night is dark and unseasonably cold and rain is lashing against the flimsy windows, rattling the cheap glass against the cheaper tin frame, and the radiator is humming like it’s rapidly developing a whooping cough, and Martha is curled up on the hideous flower-print couch, folding laundry and gripping a mug of hot cocoa and doing her best to avoid the dodgy spring.

There is a knock on the door. Martha scowls at it, looks mournfully at her cocoa, and heaves herself to her feet.

She is halfway across the miniature living room when she hears the scraping of a key in the lock, unsettlingly juddering little clicks, and the front door bangs open with a maximum of drama and also a maximum of draught. A man comes in through a combination of ungainly stumbling and being blown in by the wind, looking more or less like a drowned rat and bleeding from the temple.

“Oh, God,” says Martha, and nearly drops her mug, “Doctor?”

“Were you expecting someone else?” breezes the Doctor, with a blitheness somewhat undermined by the occasional shiver. He looks up at Martha, blinking wide-eyed like he’s seeing her for the first time. “Martha – ”

“Hush,” says Martha, part soothing and part stern. She crosses the small distance between them in two strides, shuts the door with a sharp click. The Doctor is slouched against the wall, clinging to a coat hook with shaking fingers. Martha’s fingers are steady, but then, when are they not?

“Here,” she says, tucking an arm under his armpits and ignoring the way his sodden coat is dripping all over her freshly-cleaned linoleum, “it’s alright, you’re alright, I’ve got you. Let’s get you over to the couch, yeah?”

The Doctor, stubborn idiot that he is, refuses to let go of the coat hook. Martha seriously considers prying his fingers off herself. With a pair of pliers if necessary.

“I’m fine, Martha, really. Look,” he says, and flashes her his most dazzling grin, manic dancing eyes and all. It somehow fails to hide the fact that his teeth are chattering. “right as rain. Well, really a lot of rain. Really chilly rain, but that’s not the point. I’m _fine_.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” snaps Martha, “you’re bleeding, _and_ you’re shaking. Now, either you let me help you to the couch, or you sit down right there and _don’t move_ while I go and get the first-aid kit.”

“You fuss too much. Fuss, fuss, fuss,” says the Doctor, with a petulant scowl. “I am a grown man, actually several centuries beyondfully grown, and may I point out that I am the one of the two of us who actually _has_ a medical degree, in thirteen galaxies in fact, _and_ I am also currently the only being in the universe who understands my own personal biology and – Martha? Martha, are you listening to me?”

Martha rolls her eyes and goes to get the first-aid kit.

When she comes back, she finds the Doctor sitting cross-legged in a puddle on the linoleum, coat and suit jacket lying in a sad and sopping pile next to the door. “Good,” she mutters, and if it comes out a little ironic and crabby, well, one is not the master of one’s moods. “You do have a bit of sense, at least. Now, are you going to tell me how you ended up with a head wound and all the makings of pneumonia when you were meant to be in here all day fixing the refrigerator, or am I going to have to take a wild guess?”

She settles herself on the floor, carefully skirting the puddle, and opens up the kit. Bandages, antiseptic, heat packs. _Not too bad_ , she thinks, and thanks her lucky stars they’d ended up stuck in the late 60s instead of another, more primitive time. Such as, oh, say, 1913?

From the Doctor: silence. Martha looks up. There’s something in the Doctor’s eyes, something dark and deep and faraway that goes beyond ego and beyond cold and beyond the frustration of one always running being suddenly stuck, and for a moment Martha feels a shudder like every drop of the freezing rain still falling in sheets outside.

“You shouldn’t be doing this,” says the Doctor, gaze distant and voice hollow. Martha cracks the first of the heat packs and places it over the Doctor’s chest, between his hearts, and breathes deep to keep her hands steady.

“Well,” she says, evenly, “I’m sorry if I’m bruising that massive ego of yours, mister, but this happens to be my job.”

“It’s not,” snaps the Doctor, “actually,” and Martha bites down the sudden surge of hurt and the line about her training and her exams and tugs his head down into her lap instead, with maybe a bit more force than necessary.

She touches the cut over his temple with a warm wet cloth, clearing away the first of the blood, and he flinches, but the distance in his eyes doesn’t go away.

“The first time we met,” says the Doctor, hazily, woozy with something like pain, “you restarted my hearts. I took you on one trip and you had to do it again, and then I got myself electrocuted and you had to look after me _then_ , and after _that_ I got myself possessed by a _sun_ , and you were the one who had to get it out of me. Are you not seeing a pattern here? Because I am. Seeing a pattern.”

“Yeah,” says Martha, with a snort, “apparently, your survival instincts have gone on permanent holiday.” The cut’s nearly clean. She gives it one final wipe and goes for the antiseptic. “Bet they were working fine when Rose was around.”

It’s a petty statement, and Martha knows it. It also comes out a bit more bitter than she’d intended. She blames it on her sudden lack of cocoa.

The Doctor turns his head suddenly, catching Martha’s eye. A blob of antiseptic smears all over his eyebrow. His gaze is so intense that Martha barely even notices.

“You,” says the Doctor, enunciating clearly, “are not Rose.”

It stings like a slap in the face. It shouldn’t, Martha knows, but it does. “Yeah,” she says, her voice gone chilly, “I know I’m not.”

“I could lie to Rose,” continues the Doctor, more or less obliviously. He drops his gaze, turns his head back, presumably to give Martha better access to his wound. It doesn’t matter. Her hands seem to have frozen. “I can’t lie to you. Don’t know why. Wish I did. It’d make everything easier, wouldn’t it, lying? Mean you wouldn’t always have to be taking care of me.”

Martha swallows, says nothing for a moment. Doctors’ voices, like their hands, don’t shake, and she will not let hers.

“Well,” she says, when she can trust her voice again, “thank you.”

“Oh, no,” says the Doctor, “don’t thank me. It’s not a good thing, this. I can’t lie to you and I trust you too much, and so I promise you the stars and what do you get? Three months as a skivvy in the nineteen-tens and another three as a shopgirl in the sixties. Pulled you from a boring flat and exams and dumped you back in a boring flat with sticky floors.”

Martha swabs on the last of the antiseptic and unpeels a bandage from its wrapper. The cut looks better already, no longer bleeding and turning gently pink instead of an angry red. She wonders how he needs her, if he can heal himself so quickly. She wonders if maybe this is part of why he hates needing her at all.

“Martha Jones,” sighs the Doctor, and there’s so much bitterness in his tone that for a second Martha hates him, just a little, for saying her name in that way, “ _I_ was supposed to be _your_ doctor.”

Martha looks at the bandage in her hand, at the Doctor’s face, wise and pained and vulnerable and pale in her lap, and thinks about healing, about helping, about being support and loving it. She thinks about her family and being referee. She thinks about her patients and her instructors and bedside manner and respect and always having to work against her age, her race, her gender. She thinks about what she wants and whether she’s getting it, all the ways she’s missing out on what she needs, and are there really so many?

The radiator sputters. The Doctor’s shirt is nearly dry. Beneath it, he is still shivering, just the tiniest of vibrations, and she grasps his shoulder with a hand that is forever steady and thinks about warmth and giving it, and which she’d rather have.

“It’s alright, Mister Smith,” says Martha, “it’s alright.”


	4. Stars

“Oi, Spaceman,” says Donna, from the console room doorway, “are you planning on moving from that spot any time soon, or are you just gonna mope there for the rest of the week?”

The Doctor doesn’t respond, too busy getting his skinny little body buried in wires and gears and bits of machinery that Donna probably couldn’t put a name to in a million years even if she wanted to, which she doesn’t, she’s not a mechanic. What she _is_ is a woman with several decades’ worth of experience with the joys of the female hormonal cycle and friends who could win an Olympic gold medal in moping and a mother who could win an Olympic gold medal in moping _and_ whining. And because Donna has always been a great believer in picking up essential life skills from any situation, however unsavoury, what she is now is also a woman armed with a tea tray and steely determination, with a pint of chocolate ice cream put away in the freezer as a back-up plan.

She comes round the console to stand over the hole in the grating that the Doctor seems to be progressively burrowing himself into, and nudges him with a toe in the absence of any better options.

“Oi,” she says, again, “Doctor. Are you even listening to me?”

The Doctor sighs, looking up at long last and raising his eyebrows at her outstretched foot. “Donna,” he says, sounding vaguely put-upon, “I’m kind of in the middle of something here.”

“Is the TARDIS about to explode?” asks Donna, mostly ironically but not without a hint of worry. She’s been around here long enough to realize that sudden detonation is always a possibility. “Or implode? Or, I don’t know, crash into Belgium or suddenly jettison all the bathrooms or something?”

The Doctor sighs again. “No,” he says, reluctantly, and Donna wonders what kind of crazy could ever say ‘no, my time-and-space ship is not about to explode and take the rest of the universe with it _’ reluctantly_ , “but it’s – “

“Then get your skinny bottom up here and help me carry the tray,” she says, in a tone that brooks little argument and also manages to be amiable whilst subtly threatening grievous bodily harm, “The poor girl’s probably had enough of you poking about in her circuits and what-not anyway.”

The TARDIS hums in agreement. The Doctor scowls, gingerly extricating himself from the tangle of green wires around his stick-legs and muttering what would probably be some very choice swear words, if Donna could understand Swahili.

She shoves the tea tray in his hands as soon as he pulls himself out of the floor, and he shoots her a look which she ignores. It’s an astonishingly well-appointed tea tray, after all, with a little silver pot of perfectly-brewed tea, and a little jug of milk and an overflowing sugar bowl that Donna has no doubt the Doctor’ll empty in no time flat, and several plates piled high with biscuits of all varieties but mostly chocolate. Or whatever passes for chocolate on alien planets.

At any rate, she put it together herself, and she’s not going to be registering any looks she may receive that aren’t at least fifty percent grateful.

“Really, Donna,” says the Doctor, face half-hidden behind the teapot, “I appreciate the concern – at least, I’m going to go ahead and assume this is concern, because there are one thousand five hundred and twenty-six different alien toxins that would induce an insatiable craving for chocolate or tea but I don’t think you’ve been in contact with any of them recently – but, um, this is, this is really not necessary. At all.”

“Yeah, yeah,” says Donna, having mostly tuned him out after the first ten seconds of unstoppable rambling, “sure,” and flings open the TARDIS doors.

They’d left the vortex a while back, thank goodness, because _that_ view would be way beyond highly weird. They’re floating in deep space instead, the slight oil-slick sheen of the automatic gravity bubble barely visible against the black, and Donna shakes off the sudden vertigo in favour of settling cross-legged in the doorway, looking out. The Doctor joins her a moment later, placing the tea tray down between them and kicking his long gangly legs out into the dark.

“Right,” says the Doctor, rolling his shoulders testily, “what’s all this about, then?”

“You tell me,” says Donna, attempting to knock the stubbornness out of him with her gaze alone and, far as she can tell, nearly succeeding. “You’re the one who’s been drowning your sorrows in a pile of outer-space car guts for the past three days.”

“I told you,” scoffs the Doctor, and refuses to meet her eyes, “I’ve been changing the regulator valves and rewiring the thermo-temporal circuits and fixing the ventilation and, and – all TARDISes need maintenance every now and then. It says so in the manual!”

“The manual,” Donna repeats, slowly, “which you threw in a supernova. Yeah, pull the other one, mate.”

The Doctor says nothing for a long moment. Donna pours the tea, to fill the silence.

“This is about Jenny,” says Donna, “isn’t it.”

The Doctor sighs, long and loud and aggravated. “Yes,” he snaps, angling his body away from her, “and God forbid I should take some time to mourn my own daughter, who, if you’ll recall, died _taking a bullet for me_. Surely that’s, that’s dangerous enough to warrant an intervention.”

“There’s nothing wrong with mourning her,” Donna snaps right back, “but you’re starting to wallow in self-pity, and that pit of yours goes fathoms deep, don’t think I haven’t noticed, Spaceman. Is that really what she would’ve wanted?”

“I don’t know what she would’ve wanted!” the Doctor says, nearly cries, really, and then looks supremely put out that he’d allowed himself to cry anything at all. “She was alive for, what, four, six hours? She never had a chance to want anything at all!”

Donna lifts her cup of tea to her lips, takes a long breath of steam and huffs it out over the surface. The tea ripples. Donna’s voice comes out calm. “What,” she says, softly, gently, “do _you_ want, Doctor?”

“I,” says the Doctor, and stops, choked, like the words are catching in his throat, like they don’t want to come out or maybe like too many want to come at once. “I – I don’t, I don’t know. Nothing. I don't want anything.”

“Don’t be daft,” Donna says, reprovingly, and pokes him in the arm, “everybody wants something.” She leans out the doors, just an inch, and points at the first flicker of light she sees. It glimmers like a diamond.

“Star light, star bright,” she says, taking a sip of tea, “I wish I had a coat and fuzzy slippers. Blimey, it’s cold out here, isn’t it?”

The Doctor laughs, huskily. “What, in the endless empty vacuum of space?” he says, and dodges her slap, “I suppose it might be, yeah.”

Donna glares at him over the rim of her teacup. “Stop being a spoilsport, Spaceman. Make a wish.”

“But Donna,” whines the Doctor, “we could actually _visit_ that star instead of just _pointing_ at it like children. We are serious travellers. Making wishes is so awfully infantile.”

“Oh, and you’re _never_ childish, I suppose.”

“Never,” the Doctor says, completely serious. Donna pokes him again. “Fine! Fine. I wish I… I wish I had… thicker socks.”

“Feeble,” Donna scoffs. “I wish I could get my mother to shut up for five minutes, next time I go home for a visit.”

“I wish – I wish I knew how to fix my TARDIS so she’d stop ganging up with my friends against me,” says the Doctor, and grabs the doorframe with more than a bit of terror as the TARDIS bucks disapprovingly. “Okay, okay, sorry. I take that one back.”

“I wish,” says Donna, biting down her laugh and sounding completely serious. “I wish I could make more of myself. Than, you know, just a London temp with a big gob.” She laughs, a little, ruefully. “And a time machine.”

“You have, though,” says the Doctor, sounding more than a little surprised. “You’re brilliant, Donna Noble. You must know that.” He turns slightly as he says this, finally looking her in the eye. “And, you know, technically the time machine is _mine_.”

“Eh,” says Donna, “technically.”

They sit in silence for a moment. The Doctor takes his tea from the tray, plunks in four sugar cubes, stirs meditatively. His mouth twists, slightly, and his eyes darken by increments. Donna watches him like a hawk, and doesn’t say anything more.

“I wish,” says the Doctor, covering a slight hitch in his voice with a gulp of tea, “I wish I – I wish I still had,” and he waves his hands expansively, tea flash-freezing as it sloshes out of his cup, as if to encompass everything he doesn’t have, all the names he cannot speak, all the ones he loved he’ll never see again. There are so many, Donna knows, Donna can guess. There are so many that if he spoke them all they’d be sitting here all year. That is not the reason he does not.  

“I wish I had lost less,” says the Doctor, nearly a whisper. “I wish I had gained more. I wish I still had – everything. That’s selfish, isn’t it? Selfish and more than a little bit greedy.”

He asks this to the empty air around them, but he turns and looks at Donna, eyes locking with hers and searching. Donna takes another sip of tea, a long one, and considers.

“Yeah,” she says, after a long moment, “it is. But I suppose you deserve it, if anyone does.”

The Doctor nods, slowly, and swings his legs back and forth, kicking up stardust. He smiles.

“Donna,” says the Doctor, grinning like a little kid, “I wish I had a chocolate biscuit.”

Donna snorts. “Take one yourself, Spaceman. I’m not serving it to you.”

The Doctor does. He gets the crumbs all over his shirtfront. Donna says nothing.

  


	5. Knocks

The Master has not had an easy life. This is, upon further reflection, not really that surprising. After all, being a gleefully psychotic near-immortal who has spent significant chunks of his life attempting world- or universe-domination in bodies little more luxurious than a burnt-out corpse or a stolen, slowly decomposing cadaver or a copy of his last regeneration that had somehow acquired a truly unfortunate dye job and become bent on eating itself up from the inside never has been particularly conducive to enjoying life’s simple pleasures.

Still, life does occasionally provide pleasures too enticing to ignore. Tying the Doctor up, for example, never does seem to get old, even if the sanctimonious bastard seems bent on sucking all the joy out of it by watching him, mournfully, like there is something unspeakably tragic about the entire situation, like there is anything else the two of them could conceivably be doing together instead.

“Why are you doing this?” asks the Doctor, nearly a whisper, eyes wide and searching. The Master wants to slap him, more than he usually wants to slap him, even, because he has no _right_ , no bloody _right_ to look so innocent and guileless and sad when both of them know that his hands are so soaked in blood they ought to be _glowing_ with it. “What could you possibly hope to gain?”

The Master leans back, away, like a recoil but less afraid and more _considering_. There was a time, he supposes, when his plans actually involved some kind of personal reward, power or immortality or wealth or any of those stupid little things all the other stupid little people that _somehow_ think they have the right to rule and run and live in this stupid little universe love to kill each other over. There was a time when his first thought, born back into a body ever dying, would be to find some way of saving himself, rather than dooming the rest of this little planet to live ever dying too. There was a time for all of that, but that was – that was somewhen before the gnawing, the creeping madness, when he was driven by thought and want and not instinct and wild, rabid, nonsensical _need –_

“Oh, Doctor,” says the Master, flashing him a feral grin, all teeth and hunger, “The question is, _what else could I possibly be doing?”_

The Doctor closes his eyes, just for a second, and the Master _does_ slap him, then, because this disapproval is – it’s more than annoying, more than aggravating. It’s _dishonest_ , is what it is, and right now, he’s had it up to _here_ with the Doctor’s dishonesty.

“Tell me, then,” hisses the Master, grabbing the Doctor’s shoulders and shaking, hard. “Why are _you_ doing this? Why is it every time, every _single time_ I turn around, you’re standing right there, trying to stop me? Trying to forgive me? To redeem me? What could _you_ possibly hope to gain?”

“I don’t know,” says the Doctor, low and intimate, and his eyes flash with something like uncertainty, like surety, like fear. “What else could I possibly be doing?”

A silence. Then the Master laughs, reeling backwards again like a taut string snapping, like something breaking and _opening_ inside the black hole he has for a chest. “Look at you!” he says, shouts, snaps, something angry and animal like glee filling his voice. “ _Look at you!_ Always _standing_ there, little beacon of righteousness, trying to guide me to, to a _path_ that is so much lighter and brighter and _better_ , isn’t that right, Doctor? But when it gets down to it, what are you really? What are you really, but _me_?”

The Doctor flinches, harder than he had at any slap, harder, almost, than he had at watching the Earth burn. The Master’s grin widens till he can feel his face cracking with the strain of it, but then he has always been a broken thing. It’s not like he _minds_.

“I am not you,” says the Doctor, hard and cold, “I am not – I am not a _destroyer_. I am not _mad_. I am _nothing_ like you.”

The Master leans back in, till their faces are close enough to brush, till their temples are all but pressing against each other. From here, even with this small bit of distance between them, he can feel the Doctor’s mind, feel it rail and rage against the dying of too many lights to name, and it ignites something hot and vindicated in his ravenous belly.

“Oh,” he murmurs, breath warm and close and heavy, “aren’t you, though?”

He tips his head back, just an inch, and this time his smile is thin and jagged and quicksilver-slippery. “You forget, Doctor,” says the Master, “you think you can see me, see all that hidden _goodness_ in me, you think you can see me clearer than I can see myself. You forget that I can see _you_ , too.”

The Doctor takes a breath, sharp and shallow. “No,” says the Doctor, eyes hollow, “I remember.”

“Yeah,” says the Master, and knows he’s won, again, “you do.”

He says nothing, for a minute or so, feeling each second ticking away in his mind in four-four time, eyes fixed on the Doctor. The Doctor watches him back, mouth pressed closed, and for once his eyes are almost entirely unreadable. Far away, they can both hear the sound of helicopters, of orders being shouted in a single unhinged voice, of the old man with the adorably stubborn devotion yelling threats and oaths through a hard pane of glass, but between the both of them the silence is taut, electric, all-consuming.

“Mind you,” says the Doctor, voice lightening over the struggle in his eyes, “I _have_ loved, other people. Bright, brilliant, amazing people. That’s different, isn’t it?”

“Ah, yes,” says the Master, almost fondly. “I remember. Martha Jones, she was something, wasn’t she? And that Captain Jack – just scrumptious, I had quite the thing for him. How many others have you had, since you up and destroyed everyone _real?_ “

The Doctor smiles, just a half-smile, a crooked little thing. It makes the Master happy, that they match. “Why would I tell you?”

“Oh, you don’t have to,” says the Master, sing-song, and taps him on the temple. “I can _feel_ them, in _here_. Where are they, eh? Where are your bright and brilliant human pets? Gone, taken, left you?”

The Doctor says nothing. His smile flickers. “Yes.”

“Well, then,” says the Master. “Taken,” he says, and lifts his hand to strike the Doctor in the chest, between his hearts, just a light tap. A gentle knock.

“Left behind,” he says, and knocks again. The Doctor’s gaze does not waver.

“Left you,” he says, and knocks again. The Doctor sucks in a gulp of air, and says nothing.

“Gone,” says the Master, and knocks one more time. The Doctor’s eyes flutter shut, and, quickly, almost imperceptibly, he nods.

“The heartbeat of a Time Lord,” whispers the Master, “can you feel it now?”

“Sometimes,” says the Doctor, just as quiet, “I think we live too long.”

The Master laughs again, short and cutting. “Of course we do.”

He drops to his knees beside the Doctor’s chair, tightens the ropes around the Doctor’s ankles, moves up slowly, snapping buckles and yanking on straps. When he is standing again, adjusting the bindings around the Doctor’s chest, he leans in, one more time.

“Doctor,” whispers the Master, right into his ear, “you are not alone.”

When he fastens the strap around the Doctor’s mouth, the Doctor does not resist.  


	6. Cracks

The TARDIS is a multi-dimensional being who exists across all of time and space, has an innate intuitive knowledge of every event that ever happened or ever will or might or won’t or cannot, and also happens to be in possession of telepathic circuits that allow her to do a fair amount more than the cheap parlour tricks she usually restricts herself to. She has a sophisticated voice interface system and the ability to translate nearly any language in the known universe and several unknown ones besides, and she’d long ago developed an intimate relationship with Gallifreyan poetry.

Nevertheless, whenever she chooses to communicate with linear beings, they tend to hear what basically amounts to a vague hum.  

In this instance, the hum is equal parts amused and annoyed, and accompanied by an immense clatter of things falling off other things and the scattering of gears of all varieties and someone’s foot colliding with a four-dimensional particle accelerator with a loud, bruising _thunk_.

“Um,” says Rory, hefting a cup of tea and wiggling his toes with a wince, “hi.”

The Doctor glances up from the pile of wires at his feet. He freezes, just for a second, and then his face twists, smile lighting it up like a slow dawn. His grin is bright and manic and childlike, and it clings to his cheeks like it’s trying to pretend it’s been there all along.

“Rory!” cries the Doctor, clapping his hands together and leaping out of the sling seat and nearly braining himself on the underside of the glass floor, “yes! Hello! What can I do for you?”

“Oh,” Rory says, more than a little awkwardly, “um. I just, uh, wanted to come see what you were up to, you know, alone, in the middle of the… night. And, um. Say hi.”

The Doctor relaxes minutely, grin slipping gently back off his face, and Rory thinks about armour and wearing it and what a man like the Doctor could possibly fear.

“Ah,” says the Doctor, “Right then. Hello. Just, ah, doing some repairs, nothing terribly interesting, shouldn’t you be in bed?”

Rory cocks an eyebrow, taking a deep breath and settling his shoulders. “Shouldn’t you?”

“I’m a Time Lord, Rory,” the Doctor says, and this new smile is soft and wistful and uncharacteristically old, “I don’t. Really do the whole...  _sleeping_ thing.”

Rory nods, slowly, rocks back on his heels. His hands look like they’d very much like to be wringing themselves, were they not already occupied with holding tea, but he holds his back straight and steady. There’s a steely glint in his eye that’s not really new, but it scares the Doctor, just a little, all the same.

“You do dream, though,” says Rory, and the Doctor exhales.

“Yes,” says the Doctor, looking away, “I suppose I do.”

A silence. The Doctor flails wildly for something to do with his hands, singes the tip of his left index finger on the end of a live wire, barely feels it. Rory looks away, politely, and waits. He’s good at waiting, is Rory.

“You know,” says Rory, when the moment has passed, “Amy doesn’t think he was real. The Dream Lord, I mean. She kept insisting he was some kind of psychic projection, a figment of our imaginations, or some product of malicious pollen-spiking by one of your enemies, something like that.”

The Doctor turns back to look at him, slowly. “You wanted to ask me if that was true,” he says, not asking, voice guarded. He still doesn’t meet Rory’s eyes.

“No,” says Rory, “I know better.”

The Doctor stares at him for a moment, eyes wide and dark and hurt, then his eyelids flutter shut, squeeze tight, blocking out something he doesn’t want to see. His smile vanishes entirely, and Rory is struck by how tired the Doctor looks when he’s not smiling.

“Rory,” says the Doctor, eyes still shut tight, “I – “ and then he presses his lips in on each other and shrugs, and stops. Rory feels something clench inside him, tender and tight.

“You,” says Rory, calm and practiced, enunciating each word carefully, “are her hero. You’re her imaginary friend, her magical Raggedy Doctor. She was _obsessed_ with you, as a kid. She took a pair of pruning shears to my dad’s favourite tie, once, so I could play you. She almost didn’t let me take it off.”

The Doctor sighs, rubbing a hand over his face. “And then I left her,” he says, voice thick. “I know. I know.”

“No, you see, that doesn’t matter,” Rory says, and takes a step closer. The Doctor doesn’t flinch back, but it’s a close thing. “Not to her. To _her_ , you’ll always be her Raggedy Doctor. Her hero. She’ll never let herself see the cracks under the skin.” Rory takes a deep breath, another one. The Doctor doesn’t breathe at all. “But I will.”

The Doctor nods, once, slow. “Alright,” he says, and steps away. “I understand.”

Rory sighs. “No, I don’t think you do,” says Rory, and watches as the Doctor’s eyes open again, surprised and searching. Rory smiles, just a bit, ironic but gentle as he can.

“I love Amy,” says Rory, shrugging to shake off the oddness of saying something so glaringly obvious. “I love her so much it’s a bit pathetic. She’s absolutely bloody gorgeous, and she’s the most incredible person I’ve ever met, and I would, I would do absolutely anything for her.” He sighs here, and bobs slightly on the balls of his feet.

“And,” Rory says, shrugging helplessly, “she is an absolutely _pants_ girlfriend.”

The Doctor snorts, almost involuntarily. Rory prays that Amy hasn’t heard. She does have this uncanny knack, after all, of appearing as if conjured whenever someone says her name. And responding rather badly when what follows isn't  altogether complimentary.

“Look, Doctor,” says Rory, and here he is completely serious, completely earnest. “I know what you must think of me. You think I’m kind, and devoted, and naive, and a bit of a doormat. And I can’t – I can’t argue with any of that, really. But the love of my life spent the first year of our relationship kissing other men for shopping money and ran away with you on the night before our wedding, and don’t think for a moment that any of those things, me being naive or me being kind or me being too weak to get out, don’t think for a _moment_ that those are the reasons why I am still in love with her.”

Rory pauses, looks up. The Doctor is staring at him like he’s something entirely unexpected, something entirely captivating and bewildering and new, and Rory realizes, with a jolt, that it’s a feeling he actually enjoys.

“I love Amy because I _love_ her, and that means I will stay no matter how many times she runs away. And you can be as dark as you like, Doctor,” says Rory, and finally, finally, the Doctor meets his eyes. “and you can hate yourself so much those parts of you start needing their own face, but I’m still travelling with you, and me being weak or, or blind, or dazzled - that has nothing to do with why I’m staying."

He pauses. The Doctor is still staring, and Rory doesn't look away. "Now do you understand?”

The Doctor takes a long breath, deep and thirsty like he’s been drowning and only just stopped. “Yeah,” he says, and a new smile spreads across his face, gentle and crooked and, maybe for the first time, real. “Yeah. I. I suppose I do.”

“Good,” says Rory, and smiles, tension bleeding out of his shoulders. He lifts an arm, a bit stiffly, and shoves the mug of still-warm tea in the Doctor’s face. “Here. I, uh, don’t really know how any of your, um, biology works, they don’t teach that sort of thing in nursing school, but I thought, you know, tannins and antioxidants and how much harm could a cup of tea do, it’s _tea_ , so. I made this for you.”

The Doctor takes it from him with both hands, like something fragile, like something precious. “Thank you,” he says, wondering, and his fingers tighten around the mug.

“You’re welcome,” says Rory, and turns to go to bed.

“Rory,” says the Doctor, and Rory turns back. The Doctor’s smile is fond, now, and wistful again, but there’s something lost about his eyes. “You, and Amy – what did I ever do to deserve you?”

Rory shrugs. “You didn’t,” he says, “but you know it doesn’t work like that.”

“No, I suppose not,” the Doctor says, and something in his eyes is _found_. “Anyway! Goodnight, Rory Williams, you’d best get to bed. Get back to your fiancée and that sleep you humans love so much.”

“Alright,” says Rory, going. “Goodnight, Doctor. Do try and, you know, get to bed yourself. At some point. Preferably tonight.”

The Doctor nods, still smiling, and takes a sip of tea.


	7. Silence

“Amelia Pond,” whispers the Doctor, in the darkness.

His voice rustles the air around them, little rustling echoes bouncing all around. Even when he tries, he finds, the Doctor can’t stop himself from breaking the quiet.

Amy stirs, flame-red hair rustling and shifting against her pillow. It catches the thin, limping light from the cracked-open door, shimmering like starfire in the twilit room. The Doctor brushes an errant strand from her forehead with the tips of his fingers and thinks of a lion.

“My little Amelia,” he murmurs, and smiles, a quiet crooked thing. “I left you behind again, today. I suppose you’ll know that by now. Rory would’ve told you. He can’t keep anything from you, can he? Not your Rory.” He huffs a laugh, and it’s soft like the sadness in his eyes. “Not like your old Doctor, eh? Silly old Doctor. He knows you’re smart enough to know when he’s lying to you, glorious Pond, but he just can’t seem to stop.”

Amy shifts again, murmurs something the Doctor can’t hear. He could press closer, try and pick it out, but he figures she deserves to keep something of herself hidden, even if she doesn’t mean to. He’s taken so much of her already. He’s kept so much of himself back.

He brushes another strand of hair off her cheeks. He just hopes they’re good dreams.

“You shouldn’t be here, you know,” the Doctor says, throat tight. “You should take your Rory and run… so far away. Go someplace safe. Somewhere you can, you can be in love and kiss each other all the time and live out your wonderful, your _beautiful_ old ordinary lives. It’s no good for you, you know, trailing around after the likes of me. You’re too good for that.”

In the dark, makeup gone and eyes no longer blazing, Amy looks young. Younger. She looks fresh, and bright, and innocent, and vulnerable, but then again the Doctor has always looked at her and seen a bold and shining little girl in a bobble hat and red wellies.

He curves his palm against her jaw but doesn’t touch. He’d cup her cheeks in his hands if he could trust himself not to break her.

“My fault, I know,” says the Doctor, and if his voice cracks that’s alright, that’s fine, because Rory’s asleep in the bunk above and Amy’s asleep here beneath his fingers, so glorious and so _alive_ , and there is no one, no one to hear it. “I promised you the stars, didn’t I, Pond? That was lie number one. Little girl like you, Scottish girl in an English village, all that fire in your eyes like suns, how could you have known? But I should have. I _did_. Stupid, selfish old Doctor.”

He lifts a hand to his own cheek, mirroring, and presses down hard. He doesn’t bother with tenderness, not with this touch. He doesn’t need it. He doesn’t deserve it, either.

The hand comes away wet. The Doctor tucks it in his pocket.

“Oh, Amelia,” the Doctor says, “I took your childhood from you. I didn’t mean to, but I did. And I nearly lost you Rory, so many times. I nearly lost _you_ ,” and here he pauses, gulps in a breath like the desperate drowning man he’ll never let her see he is. There is a reason why he is always lying to her.

“I took your daughter. I took your baby girl away, Amelia, and you forgave me for it.” The Doctor’s hands are shaking. He rubs them over his face, just once, harshly, and folds them together in his lap and holds tight. “I didn’t mean to, then, either. You have to believe me, Amelia. I never mean to. I’m just an old man who’s forgotten how to hold on to precious things, and I don’t understand – you should have slipped through my fingers long ago now.”

Amy hums, softly, and stretches out, arching her back like a cat. A smile spreads across her face, gentle and peaceful and real. Good dreams, then. No place for a sad man to intrude. He should go.

“You still trust me,” whispers the Doctor, wondering. “You shouldn’t. I don’t understand you, Amelia. I’ll never understand you. You’re as magical to me as I am to you. You shouldn’t tether yourself to an old fraud who’ll only let you down.”

He leans forward, presses a kiss to her temple. He wants to linger, fold her in his arms, keep her. He won’t.

“You’ll learn, my glorious Pond,” says the Doctor, and stands. “You’ll learn.”

A soft hand closes around his wrist, tugs. Amy snuffles. “Raggedy Man,” she mutters, sleepy-cranky and fond. “That you?”

“Yeah, Pond,” says the Doctor, breath caught in his throat. He exhales and smiles, slow, soft, wet. “It’s me.”

“Are you sulking by my bedside, Raggedy Man?” murmurs Amy, voice growing sharper and brighter and more _Amy_ , a light slowly rising. “ _Why_ are you sulking by my bedside? I’m _fine_.”

The Doctor chuckles, low and light. “I know you are, Pond. You’re a fighter.”

“Mm,” hums Amy, and rolls over. She doesn’t let go of his wrist.

“Go back to sleep, Pond,” says the Doctor, and eases her fingers away. “Goodnight.”

He makes it halfway to the door before he hears her call his name.

“Doctor,” says Amy, and her eyes are open and bright in the dark, “I love you. You know that, right?”

The Doctor smiles, wondering and bright with wet eyes, and shuts the door behind him.

He doesn’t answer. She should know better than to wait for one, should’ve learned that by now, at least. She’s a smart girl, his Amy. She’s probably already asleep.

     


	8. Angels

It is a wonderful night, but then it is always a wonderful night, as far as River knows. They hold each other, after, and that is wonderful too.

“I'm sorry,” the Doctor says, sliding a thumb down her spine, almost absently. River hums, long and low and sensual, and oh, he loves her, he loves her so much it could break his hearts. 

He traces patterns on her bare back with his fingers, whorls and swirls and spirals like the gold light that poured out of her, his miracle, the second time she kissed him and every time after and before and again. Her skin is soft and silken and her curls catch around his knuckles and the Doctor doesn’t stop until he realizes he’s been tracing her name across her shoulderblades in a language that only the two of them could understand because everyone else is dead.

River catches his right hand before he can pull it away, kisses his palm and doesn’t mention how she can feel it shake.

“I forgive you,” murmurs River, and the Doctor freezes, left hand still tangled in her hair. 

He props himself up on his elbow and stares.  River watches him watching her, and her eyes go soft and affectionate and she can feel something rich and stabbing in her chest, the warmth of red wine and the sting of hypervodka and a sympathetic wince that slides bone-deep. 

“You don't even know what I'm sorry _for_ ,” says the Doctor, part wonder and part accusation. His eyes are too narrow for the moment, and the shadows beneath them are dark but not as dark as the ones inside. He twists his fingers, once, sharply, and the gold trapped between them curls riotously away. 

The pain in River’s chest rises, swells, till it blooms hot like blood and sharp like loss and beautiful like the endless stars, like the velvet dark, like the end-beginning fire of a regeneration.  

Some fools, she knows, would feel this shining heartsache and call it love. As if love wasn’t infinitely more painful and more glorious and more felt and simply _more_.

River sighs and stretches, purring catlike and content over the thrumming in her veins. “Well, sweetie,” she says, eyes sparkling with mischief, hand brushing gently against his arm, "I'm guessing it's not for that  _very_  naughty thing you did with my uniform down in the console room. Which I am going to catch _hell_ for, by the way, the guards get so protective of my clothes, it's adorable.”

The Doctor chuckles, warm and rough, and kisses her behind her ear. There’s something hollow about it, and something so tender and full of love. Nobody ever said that the two were mutually exclusive.

“No,” he says, hitching with desire or grief or so easily both, “not that.”

“Is it a spoiler?” asks River, with a twinkling smirk. “Shh, sweetie, you mustn’t tell me, you bad boy. You could tear the world apart.”

She reaches out a hand and tweaks his nose just to watch him scowl. He does, whole face crumpling into a pout that strips away his dignity along with a millennium and a half of age, and maybe he does it just to hear her laugh, open-throated and light. This is how they love each other, in call-and-response.

River surges forward and nips the tip of the Doctor’s nose and he squeaks and flails and nearly whacks her in the face, and for a moment they are both incredibly, impossibly young, and this is why they _need_ each other, River thinks. There are worse reasons.

“You’d forgive me, though, if I did,” says the Doctor, faraway, chin tucked in the crook of River’s neck, taken captive in the scuffle. River scoffs and smacks the top of his head and knows to ignore the depth of the question in his eyes.

“Of course I would,” says River, still smirking, “but I’d be ever so cross.”

The Doctor huffs a laugh, soft and happy-quiet against her neck, and they hold each other there for a long moment just to luxuriate in the fact that they _can_.

“I really am sorry, though, River Song,” murmurs the Doctor, eyes shut and clenched tight. “You’d forgive me anything, wouldn’t you?”

“Oh, sweetie,” River says, and drops a kiss onto his eyelids, “I learned from the best.”

He sits up, then, cups her face in his hands and kisses her warm and rich and full on the mouth. Their kisses are always tender, because tenderness is rare and therefore precious, and they are always exciting, because danger comes in their fore and in their wake, and they always burn like fire because that is how they began, but this kiss is hungry in a way that goes beyond lust into loneliness and gentle in a way that goes beyond care and into guilt, and River returns it with all her soul and wishes it were enough.

“You don’t have to tell me why you’re sorry, Doctor,” whispers River, breathing him in as she pulls away. “You know it doesn’t matter.”

“Of course it matters,” snaps the Doctor, but River leans back in and brushes a thumb over his lips and he closes his mouth and listens, for once.

“Tell me,” says River, “how I can make it hurt less.”

The Doctor gapes at her, for a moment, swallows hard. “What makes you think I’m hurting?” he asks, but his voice breaks in all the wrong places and he doesn’t even try to look away.

River’s smile twists, exasperated and kind. “You, sweetie,” she says, softly, “are a good wizard in the books and a predator to those stupid enough to cross you and you are an angel,” and she brushes her thumb over his cheek, simple touches, “but you are my husband, and you will never be able to hide the damage from me.”

The Doctor says nothing. For once, thinks River, with some satisfaction, she has rendered him speechless. She just hopes he's also _heard_.

“Do you know why angels weep, Doctor?” River asks, into the tender hurting spot beside his jaw. “It's because they can’t let themselves be seen.”

He stills, stone-stiff, and she holds him to her chest, and then he comes apart, slowly, under her hands.

They put each other back together. They always do.

“I love you,” says one of them, later, and afterwards they cannot remember which. It doesn’t matter. It’s all the same, really.  


	9. Names

After, Clara makes tea, filling the kettle and measuring out two handfuls of loose leaf with a baker’s precision and small sharp movements, digging the non-alien milk jug and the slightly-alien sugar pot out of the cavernous cabinets with unshaking hands.

The Doctor fusses, all the while, flails around the kitchen and into Clara’s personal space, trying to snatch the kettle from her like he’s afraid she’ll be too weak to lift it, discreetly whisking the sugar and milk out from under her hands like he’s afraid she’ll chip the china. She endures about five minutes of this before her left eyelid develops a dangerous twitch.

“Doctor,” says Clara, clapping her hands around his as he tries to pull a pair of teaspoons from her perfectly steady palm, “sit _down_.”

He sits, hands still flailing, and fidgets so wildly the teacups begin to rattle.

“Well,” says the Doctor, sounding nearly miffed enough to cover over the tremor in his voice, “excuse _me_ for trying to help, little miss I-can-do-everything-myself. I’ll have you know that I’m perfectly competent at making tea. I am a tea-making champion. I once won a gold in tea-making at the five hundred and third Intergalactic Olympics.”

“I know,” Clara says, placating. “Still sit.”

The Doctor folds his arms and sulks.

His eyes, though, his eyes track her around the kitchen, deep and dark and curious and tender. He’s really _looking_ , like he’s seeing her for the first time, and Clara wonders how many times he’s going to have to do that before he realizes she’s still the same girl she was the last time he checked.

She pours the finished tea into cups – fine bone china with delicate flowers stencilled in unmatching patterns around the rim, lined up neatly in the centre of the kitchen table – and slides into a chair, movements fluid. She picks up a cup and sips, and not a hair is out of place.

“So,” says Clara, sounding almost chirpy, eyes bright over the rim, “are you alright, Doctor?”

The Doctor takes a gulp of tea, nearly drops his cup. “Me?” he sputters, “ _Me? I’m_ not the one who got splintered into, into _millions of pieces_ along someone else’s timestream, Clara Oswald. How are _you_?”

Clara raises an eyebrow, cool and calm and practiced. The Doctor’s eyes don’t leave her face, and she leans back and away but doesn’t duck her head because she needs this distance, suddenly and desperately, but she’ll be damned if she is the one to drop his gaze.

“No,” she says, crossing her arms across her chest, “I asked first.”

The Doctor is quiet for a long moment, busying himself with his tea. He stirs in half a cup of milk and four sugars and nearly spills the whole lot all over the table, and Clara has to hold herself back from slapping his hand away from the sugar bowl when he goes back for another cube.

“I’m fine,” says the Doctor, eventually, with a smile that droops at the edges and shivers with something under the skin and is undeniably, beautifully real. “Made it out in one piece, after all, thanks to you. My Clara. My incredible impossible girl.”

Clara’s smile slips. She takes another sip of tea and doesn’t say why.                

“Oswin Oswald,” says Clara, “junior entertainment manager, starship Alaska. You were going to show her the stars.”

The Doctor starts, sloshing tea all over his saucer. His eyes widen, and Clara still doesn’t look away. “You said you didn’t remember,” he says, horror creeping into his voice, thickening it in his throat, concern radiating from him in waves so strong Clara fears she’ll get washed away again. “You said – “

“Just answer the question,” snaps Clara, equal parts exasperation and desperation, because she cannot take the fear in his gaze and she cannot accept the idea that she might not be able to meet his eyes. She wants, she decides, she wants him to look away. Or she wants him to look sure. She wants him to look, if he has to look, and see _her_.

“That wasn’t a question,” says the Doctor, and the bluster nearly covers over the worry but not nearly enough. “That was – that was a _statement_. Solid, completely unambiguous, a bit disturbing, yes, but. A _statement_.”

Clara takes another sip of tea.

“Clara,” she says, “from Victorian London. You promised her worlds.” She pauses, and watches the Doctor until he blinks, so she knows he’s listening. “Didn’t you?”

“Yes,” says the Doctor, with a sigh. “I did.”

His eyes have gone far away, with wistfulness or guilt or regret, and Clara hates that she can’t tell. She hates that he’s pulling back, pulling away, hates that she can’t see him even though she’s the one who’s trying.

Clara leans in, arms on the table, pulls herself close enough to touch. “And so you took me, instead.”

Something dawns in the Doctor's eyes, something like realization, something like fear. Clara wonders, really wonders, if those two things are always the same when he is around.

“Clara,” the Doctor says, somewhat helplessly, and finally, finally, he looks away. “I promised _you_. I was going to take _you_. She was – they were _you_.”

“No,” says Clara, and grabs hold of his hand. She’s held it before, many times, because she was scared or excited or running, or because he was hurting or afraid or shaken loose, because one of them needed an anchor. Now she holds it like a tether, binding him to her. Binding him to _her_.

“No,” Clara says, firmly, and forces him to look at her again, “ _I_ am me. Not them. _I_ am.”

The Doctor rubs a thumb over her knuckles, gently, carefully, like he’s trying to memorize it or memorize her or remind himself that she’s there. He squeezes, a tight possessive squeeze, and Clara doesn’t know if she wants him to hold tighter or if she wants him to let go.

“The soufflé is not the soufflé,” says Clara, because she will make him understand. “The soufflé is the recipe. Doctor,” and she chooses, she chooses. She squeezes back. “You have many names. Who are you?”

The Doctor smiles, slow and crooked, and this one is real too. “Oh, Clara,” he says, with a small bright spark of delicate irony, “you should know that by now. I’m the Doctor.”

“Yes,” says Clara, and something shifts in his gaze, and finally, finally, she knows, she can close her eyes. “Exactly.”

The Doctor breathes in, a long sharp inhale, like he’s drinking her in, like he’s learning. He presses her hand to his cheek.

“Clara Oswald,” he asks, again. “How are you?”

“In one piece,” says Clara, “and fine.”


	10. Goodness

“Well, then,” says the Doctor, snapping the TARDIS doors shut, “Let’s get you home. Better make it quick before P.E starts missing you or he’ll get really insufferable. You humans can be so _annoying_ , you know, do you do it on purpose?”

He says this last with a theatrical shudder and a precisely-timed eyebrow lift and a calculating glint in his eye. Meant to provoke, then. Clara nods to herself, knowingly, and proceeds to thoroughly ignore it.

She settles herself on the stairs by the door, hands folded in her lap, lips pressed gently together, the very picture of nonchalance. The Doctor will see through an act like that in an instant, Clara knows. She would. She wants him to.

He takes his time at the console, throwing levers and pressing buttons and very casually avoiding Clara’s eyes. The TARDIS is already in flight before turns back around to face her.

“Why did you say that?” asks Clara, tilting her head to meet his eyes. The Doctor doesn’t flinch back, not in the slightest, but there’s the slight tilt of his left eyebrow, there’s the quirking scowl at his lips, and Clara has spent so long memorizing his tells that she can tell herself she knows what they mean.

“What, about your boyfriend being annoying?” the Doctor says, raising his hands in a mock helpless gesture, coat flaring dramatically behind him. “I’m sorry, Clara, but it’s the truth. You’d best just accept it now and save yourself the years of denial.”

Clara crosses her arms across her chest because sometimes talking to the Doctor is like arguing with a three-year-old and his ongoing feud with practically every sentient being who isn’t _her_ is getting irksome and it isn’t a defensive gesture at all, it _isn’t_.

“No, not about Danny,” she sighs, biting back her exasperation. “You know what I meant.”

The Doctor scowls further, forehead furrowing. “Oh, wow,” he says, testily, “that’s not vague at all, Miss Oswald. Call yourself an English teacher!”

Clara resists the urge to slap him.

“Goodness,” says Clara, and stands. Perched on the second step up she’s nearly eye-to-eye with him, for once, and she locks her gaze on his and doesn’t let go. “You said, ‘goodness had nothing to do with it’. Why did you say that?”

The Doctor blinks at her, owlishly, and stuffs his hands into his pockets. “Why do you think?” he asks, with every hint of irony and just the slightest bit of a shiver. “I said it because it’s true.”

He takes a step back, fiddles with the console some more. Clara’s never quite gotten on with the Old Girl for some reason she still cannot fathom, but from the little she’d been allowed to understand she can say, with a reasonable amount of certainty, that he’s not actually doing anything at all.

She leans against the railing and lets him anyway, takes a breath. “You hate yourself,” she says, and yes, it _is_ easier to say when he’s not looking at her.

The Doctor snorts, not looking up. “You say that like it’s some big revelation,” he says, voice clipped. “It doesn’t still come as a shock to you, does it? It did save our lives once, you know, I would’ve thought it’d have penetrated that thick skull of yours by now.”

He pulls at another lever, slams it down with an audible _bang_. The TARDIS rumbles dangerously. Clara loops her arm around the railing, tight, just in case, and takes little comfort in knowing that she’s not the only one off balance.

“Why?” she asks, soft and curious, and doesn’t elaborate. She doesn’t need to, and, frankly, she wouldn’t know how.

The Doctor sighs, deep and heavy, shoulders rustling against red silk lining. “Clara,” says the Doctor, turning again, meeting her eyes with a look that is tiredness and exasperation and affection, buried fathoms down, “I shouldn’t have to explain it to you.”

His eyes are steel-backed and steel-edged and soft, they’re always soft when he looks at her, always have been. For a moment Clara thinks about brown irises and blown-open pupils and a rare tragic sort of vulnerability, and wonders how she’d managed to fail to fix him.

The Doctor sighs again, settles his shoulders into something straighter and stronger and firm. “Do you know _why_ I don’t like Danny?” he asks, and for once it doesn’t sound like a taunt or a point or a statement. It sounds like a question, honest and open. It nearly takes Clara’s breath away.

“Because you’ve somehow developed a really unfair prejudice against soldiers?” she counters, quirking an eyebrow. “Because he had the gall to salute?”

“No,” the Doctor says, sharp but not defensive, and Clara unwitting, finds herself believing him. “I dislike him because you deserve better. It’s really as simple as that.”

Clara gapes for a moment, caught between outrage and offense and a strange sort of warmth in the pit of her stomach. The Doctor takes a step closer, and another, and she thinks _you don’t even know him_ and _who are you to decide that_ and _but I love him_ and somehow, somehow, all of it gets caught in her throat and she doesn’t say anything at all.

 “Clara Oswald,” he says, and his face is serious and stern and somehow approving, and Clara hates how that last one makes her heart stutter like she needs it, “you’ve never needed a role model. And if you did, you could do much, much better than me.”

Clara bites her lip, slowly, hard. “I’m not your miracle, Doctor,” she says, and keeps her voice level. The Doctor sees right through that one, too. It hadn’t been her intention.

“You think I don’t know that?” he says, and his eyes flash, just once. “I’m not your boyfriend anymore, Clara, and you’re not my impossible girl. I _see_ you now. The point still stands.”

He’s watching her, now, like he used to, with the exact same look but different eyes. Like he’s searching, like he doesn’t know her. Like he doesn’t know who she’s turning into.

She’s always hated that look. There’s a shadow over it, now, something like wisdom, something like surety. It only makes her hate it more.

“Well,” snaps Clara, “You’ve made your mind up, so there’s no point arguing, is there?”

The Doctor frowns, and for a moment his eyes are clear. “Clara,” he says, “if I ever become someone you deserve, I promise I will let you know.”

The TARDIS lands. Clara almost doesn’t feel it. The Doctor steps around her and opens the doors.

“Go home, Clara,” he says. “Go snog with your boyfriend. Be better.”

“You,” she says, and her eyes flash too, right back, “don’t get to tell me what is better.”

The Doctor smiles at her, tender and indulgent, and it makes her blood boil. “Clara,” he says, with a small chuckle, “you're going to have to stop lying to me, eventually.”

She walks back onto the street and doesn’t say goodbye.

Her fury lasts all night. In the morning, she calls him.

She doesn’t care, she decides, if he's right. It doesn't matter what she deserves. She knows what she wants, and she will have it, and it’s good enough for her.  


	11. +1

“You know,” she says, smiling a wish out the TARDIS doors, “before I met you, I already wanted to see the stars.”

She speaks these words to those stars she’d been dreaming of, and oh, those stars, they light in the swirling dark like diamonds forged in eternity, just out of reach and close enough to touch and bright enough to shift your soul. They glow in the girl’s eyes like she’s  fallen so in love with them she’s swallowed them whole, like she’s shining with them, like she only has to step into the howling black and she’ll fly up up up and dazzle it instead of being consumed.

“I’ve always had this wanderlust,” she says, her voice a brilliant whisper in the dark, “but you, you taught me how to run.”

The Doctor steps up beside her, traces out constellations with names she could never pronounce, with stories only he could ever remember. He is a wonder, as much as they are a wonder, and together, his face tilted up to catch the starlight, a million histories at his lips and tangled up in his fingers, together they are a miracle.

“And how is that?” asks the Doctor, soft and gentle and amused. She smiles up at him, laces their fingers together.

“For love, and wonder,” she says, “and to help. Towards, instead of away. There’s nothing to be gained by running away.” She cups his palm in hers, squeezes. “I learned that one from you.”

The Doctor huffs a laugh. “Learning from my mistakes, are we?” he asks, and maybe he smiles, sly and small, and maybe he scratches the back of his neck, awkward and grinning, maybe he quirks an eyebrow or lets his look go softer as irony creeps into his old, old eyes, “I must’ve taught you an awful lot.”

The girl goes quiet, for a moment. Outside, a star lets loose with a gamma ray, rare and incredible and deadly. It bounces off the TARDIS’s shielding and leaves an aurora in its wake.

Danger and beauty. Safety and shelter. The girl watches, and it warms something in her, wonder like a firework, hope like a burning coal.

“You taught me,” she says, hushed with awe but strong and sparkling and unafraid, “how to heal when your world falls apart, how to be brave in the face of the thing you most fear. You taught me how to laugh at the universe, how to be in love with life, so fiercely and so deeply that you never want to leave.”

She pauses, takes a breath. Beside her, the Doctor stares out the door with hungry eyes. He is, she knows, always hungry, for love and for light and for beauty, for the sky beneath his feet and the power in his palms and the chance, that everlasting ever-burning candle, the ever-hoping chance to be good.

She can understand that. She was born hungry, too.

“You,” she says, and starlight catches in her throat, “taught me to joy in the good things in spite of the bad and to value every person and to change without losing yourself. You taught me how to love past betrayal, what it means to be good, what it means to be strong.”

She keeps her eyes open, saying this, so she won’t drown in it, the truth and the weight and the gratitude of it. Her words drift away, instead, out into the empty space between her and infinity, free like words should always be, soaring.

“I am,” the Doctor says, his words spilling out, too, into space, chasing hers, “not nearly as good as all that.”

The girl smiles again, warm and sweet and slow. “No,” she says, and her voice is serious and earnest and almost laughing, “you’re not the person I want to be, Doctor.”And she meets his eyes, such eyes, tired and angry and sad and delighted and swimming with galaxies and so, so _beautiful_.

“But you see,” she says, “you see, you helped me to find her.”

The Doctor smiles, rare and real, and it lights up the shadows in his haunted eyes or it is soft and warm and for once doesn’t show teeth or it warms the sadness in a too-young face and makes it old again or lifts the wrinkles around his eyes and makes him _young_ –

“Yes,” he says, looking lighter, “I suppose I have.”

They stand there, for a small delicious wedge of eternity, and breathe in the possibilities and the impossibilities and the intangible joy in the _everything_ dancing before their eyes.

“Doctor,” says the girl, softly, and the Doctor –

The Doctor is broken glass and tender hearts wrapped in wit and bitterness and clothed in blue-sky eyes and leather like armour, and he looks up when he’s called like he’s searching for a light because he saw them all go but is trying to teach himself how not to believe they’re all _gone_ –

And the Doctor is hurt and relish and desire and he moves quick and bouncing and brutal in effervescence and gunpowder and he wants everything and he wants, so selfishly, to _live,_ and maybe he doesn’t really know how anymore but he’ll do it anyway, he’ll live and laugh and love even if it means something will have to break to let the light in –

And the Doctor is young and hopeful and mad, a wild fairytale thing built of hope and heartsbreak as he falls from the sky like a wishing star, and he has not so much buried his scars as become them. And he walks with a swagger that is partly earned and partly pretended, and he loves the ones strong enough to love him like they are jewels and angels and sacred things, and he has forgotten how to bite back the pain but hasn’t yet learned how to speak it –

And the Doctor is silver and steel and every glittering broken piece he’s too weak to fix and too strong to hide, and he is harsh in his kindness and hesitant with his trust and honest about his lies, he is unflinching danger and unwavering loyalty and unvarnished magic, and he cares more than he cares to and scares himself more than he’ll let on –

– and the Doctor smiles at this girl who loves him, this girl who is fantastic and brilliant and impossible and knows it because someone once told her she was, this girl who knows to make a stand and to say no, who is ordinary and amazing, who is a story and a good one, who is strong though it breaks her heart.  

“Doctor,” she says – I say – and I blink, hard, at this story that has made me fly, “you changed my life, you know.”

Into the dark, the words dance, and they fly like I have learned to, for love and wonder, among the stars.

“I know,” says the Doctor. “You’re welcome.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A very happy birthday to (new) Doctor Who, story of my heart. It was, you know, and it was the best, and here's hoping these stories never end. :)


End file.
